


Prayer to the Rising Sun

by orphan_account



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, F/F, Having Faith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 02:55:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10935513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: AUTHOR’S NOTE:  CONSIDER THIS A TASTE OF THE SUPERLANECORP AU BEFORE I START TO WRITE IT IN EARNEST.IMAGINE A WORLD IN WHICH ATENISM, EGYPT’S MONOTHEISTIC FAITH OF SUN WORSHIP, HAD NOT DIED OUT.  IMAGINE THAT HALF OF NATIONAL CITY ARE SUN WORSHIPPERS, IMBUED WITH A LOVE OF SCIENCE AND RATIONALISM.  IMAGINE A NATIONAL CITY WITH A VIBRANT ALIEN COMMUNITY.ALEX RETIRED FROM THE DEO BECAUSE OF ASTRA’S TORTURE, RESCUED HER, AND NOW HAS A TATTOO SHOP WITH SUSAN VASQUEZ.  SHE SPECIALIZES IN METALLIC INKS.  KARA MOVED THERE TO BE WITH HER SISTER AND HER AUNT.LUCY IS STILL IN CHARGE OF THE DESERT BUNKER OF THE DEO, WHILE LENA STILL RUNS L CORP AND SITS ON THE NATIONAL CITY SCIENCE COUNCIL.  THEY ARE A COUPLE, AND A MOSTLY HAPPY ONE, BUT THEY CAN'T HELP FEELING THAT KARA'S PRESENCE IN THEIR LIFE IS THE WORK OF THE DIVINE.I HAVE PLANNED A LOT OF THIS IN LONG FORM BUT HERE IS A LITTLE TASTE





	Prayer to the Rising Sun

Kara gazed out the floor to ceiling window of Lena and Lucy’s study at the silhouette of National City’s skyline: CatCo Plaza, the Kneeling Palms, the great peak of the pyramid of the Temple of Aten.  The stars had burnt themselves out, and the city’s lights were fading, but the sun had not yet made its entrance, and the sky was mute, pale, and grey.  They sat on either side of her, both looking sleepier than she felt.  Kara had actually not felt this awake in a long time.  It was one thing to be in the company of her family; Alex and Astra were home for her, in both literal and figurative ways.  But the stimulation of both mind and spirit?  That was a little harder to come by.  They had been up talking the entire night, and had not even noticed its passage until just now.

“The sun will be rising soon,” Lena observed.

“Have you ever participated in sunrise prayer to the Aten?” Lucy asked her.

Kara shook her head.  She’d met a couple of Atenists when she was at Northwestern, but had not been so saturated in the culture of that faith till she’d moved here.  

“We would welcome you, if you’re curious,” Lena said.

“The roof deck is pretty well appointed,” Lucy added.  “You don’t have to do the ritual if you don’t want to, but you can be present if you’d like.  It’s very comfortable up there.”

Kara was curious.  And what was more, she simply didn’t want to pull herself from their presence for any reason.  They filled something in her that she hadn’t been fully aware she was missing.  Was she falling in love with them?  Maybe.  She couldn’t be sure.  She wasn’t sure she had ever been in love, not really.  Could she love more than one person?  She didn’t know.  Would they even want that if it were possible?  Who could say, she thought.  All she knew at the moment was Lena’s brilliance and Lucy’s bravery stirred her mind and heart, and their faces were beautiful and she was happy to gaze on them for as long as she was permitted.

She thought with mild amusement of the first time she’d laid eyes on Lucy.  She’d had little expectation of it leading to a moment like this.

 

*********************************

 

Alex fiddled with her gun for a moment, popping out the spent cartridge and putting in a new one.  “I built this one myself,” she announced as she went about the ritual.  “Just to use on you.”

“You sure it’s gonna work?” Kara asked warily.

Alex nodded.  “Oh yeah.  I think so, anyway.”  Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice” thumped away in the background as she slipped the new cartridge into place with a small “click” and closed the pin to keep it in.  She took a cloth and wiped a little bit of shiny gold pigment off her hands.

Kara looked at the beautiful sumi-e style sleeves that wrapped around Alex’s arms (she wore sleeveless shirts to show them off).  In particular, she loved the paired cranes on her upper arm.  As Alex explained to her, the paired cranes were supposed to be good luck, but she also thought of them as representing her and Astra, Kara’s aunt, who had been Alex’s lover for the better part of six months now.  Kara had thought that due to her powers, she wouldn’t be able to have lovely body art like Alex’s.  Alex was hoping to prove her wrong.

“Susan did such a nice job on those sleeves of yours,” Kara remarked for what was probably the umpteenth time.  Susan Vasquez, Alex’s old friend from the DEO,  had a special touch with Japanese-influenced black inkwork.  It was sort of her specialty.  Alex, on the other hand, was gaining notoriety for her metallics, the inks which she had formulated herself to be completely non-toxic and not lose their brilliance over time.  They were particularly popular with the sort of alien customers who had dark, tough skin that wouldn’t take normal inks.  She’d had to develop and build her own tattoo guns to apply inks to various non-human skins.  She’d begun developing them as a hobby while she was still working for the department, and when she’d decided to “retire,” she took the not-insignifcant “retirement bonus” the DEO gave her, and decided to open a shop.  Susan had followed not long after.

Alex nodded.  “Yeah.  I mean, I hope she succeeds at this classical piano thing, but she really does have a gift for this.”

Kara gazed out the window at the passing street traffic.  It was hard to believe she was really here.  She was still getting used to it.  Midvale had been nice, but it had been so small, and so white, and so Christian.  She’d had to hide her alien-ness, and her superpowers, and her Raoism.  National City, with all of its Egyptian-influenced architecture, its high openly-alien population and its cosmopolitan pace, might as well have been a different planet altogether.  

“You’ll love it here,” Alex kept telling her while she was in college at Northwestern.  And then a few months ago, as she was finishing school and trying to decide what to do next, “You should come here.  It’d really be up your alley.  Also, you should know, your aunt is here.”

That had more or less settled it for Kara.

And she liked it here, for the most part.  National City was to America’s Atenists what Salt Lake City was to Mormons; while they accounted for only about three percent of the population in America, National City was majority-Atenist at about sixty percent.  So, one had to adjust to the rhythms of life in a town like that; brief pauses during the day for prayer times and the like.  The town was full of large, flat, open parks and plazas so that the sun-worshippers could get their fill during the day.  It was by far the brightest, sunniest city Kara had ever been to.  She liked that.  And though many things about their overall practice were different, the faith resonated with Kara’s Raoite sensibilities; sun worship, a love of science, a call for rationality and justice.  It was Earth’s oldest monotheistic religion, having survived since the time of the Pharaohs,  and the one that felt most like home to Kara.  

It was certainly much better than all that sin and Hell and redemption stuff that came along with the Christian culture she grew up surrounded by in Midvale.

The bells on the front door of the shop rang and a woman came striding in.  Kara saw in her bearing, and in the intensity of her blue eyes, and her full suit of black clothing, that she was military.  Probably DEO, as Alex had been.  “Alex Danvers?”  

Alex looked up.  “Director Lane.”  Her tone was not rude, but she didn’t seem quite happy to see this woman, either.

“Aten’s blessings on you,” she said, inclining her head to both of them.

“Thanks, back atcha.”  Alex looked her over for a moment.  “So, I’m guessing you didn’t come here looking for some new ink.”

Director Lane shook her head.  “No, Agent Danvers.”

Alex smirked.  “I’m not Agent Danvers anymore.  Just Alex, if you don’t mind.”

Director Lane sighed.  “Well, that’s why I’m here, actually.  I’m hoping to coax you out of retirement.”

Alex shook her head.  “Not a chance.  Can’t work for an organization that does the things that made me leave it.”

Director Lane looked regretful at this.  “Look, I wasn’t in charge, then.”  Kara couldn’t believe that a woman as young as she looked could be a director of a government black-ops group.  She nodded toward the back room.  “A word in private?” she asked.

Alex got up.  “Fine, come this way.”

Their retreat to the back room was merely symbolic, since Kara’s hearing could pick up their conversation ten blocks away, let alone in the next room which did not even have a door that closed.

Lane’s voice, firm and sure, but friendly and understanding.  “Look, you know I don’t approve of what was done to Astra.  And I’m making a lot of changes.”

Alex’s voice, then, equally firm, but still respectful.  “I’ve heard things to that effect.”

“It’s all true.  No more torture.  Better dental plan.  Buddhist holidays off.”  

Alex chuckled.  “That’s great.  I’m not a real Buddhist, though.  I just meditate to stay sober.”

Kara glanced through the wall then, and saw Lane’s smile, and appreciated how beautiful she actually was.  

“How are you doing with that?”

Alex shrugged.  “Still sober.”   An awkward pause.  “Listen, I know you’re not your father.  I don’t hold Astra’s torture against you.  But you gotta understand, I have PTSD about that place at this point.  Not just about what happened to Astra, either.”

“Is she alright, by the way?”

“She’s incredibly strong, but she’s still healing. But it isn’t only about what happened to her. It’s also about a lot of things I was asked to do in my time there.  I tortured people too, and witnessed torture.  I was kidnapped and forced under mind control twice.  I’ve killed people, and not that I feel that I was wrong under the circumstances, but… I shouldn’t have to tell you, of all people, that that can wear on a person.”

 _You of all people,_ Kara mused.  She wondered what that meant.  What had Director Lane done in her own life?

“Look, I do understand that.  Believe me.  It’s not as if I’d be so eager to go rushing back into Afghanistan, you know?  But I had to ask.  Your service record was exemplary.  There’s a war brewing with Cadmus.  We need good agents now, more than ever.”

Afghanistan.  That answered that.

Alex sighed.  “Well, I’m sorry, Director Lane, but that’s not going to be me.  And I don’t expect you’ll have much luck with Susan Vasquez either.  She’s focused on other things right now.”

Lane laughed ruefully.  “Yeah, I know.  I already tried.”

“Did you tell her you were planning on hitting me up?”

“Yeah, she told me I was wasting my time.”

“She was right.”

Lucy sighed.  “Well, listen.  Think about whether there’s anything I can do to make it worth your while.  Maybe I can speed along Astra’s naturalization papers or something…?”

Alex’s hesitation sounded like she was considering it for half a moment.  Everyone with an alien partner worried about naturalization papers.  The law for extraterrestrial residents was relatively permissive, but if you didn’t get fully naturalized, there were a lot of loopholes for the Federal Extraplanetary Immigration Agency to give you a hard time if they felt so inclined.  “I’ll think about it,” Alex answered curtly.  “I doubt there’s anything that would be enough to bring me back, but I’ll do you the courtesy of considering it.”

“Thank you.”

She walked out of the back with Alex, and inclined her head again to both her and Kara.  “Aten’s light be upon you,” she said. And she departed.

Kara realized then that she’d been holding her breath.  “Who was that?”

Alex sighed expansively.  “Director Lucy Lane, DEO West.  She took over after they moved my old boss to the downtown location.”

“I’m surprised they’d have someone that young and attractive running the show?”

Alex raised an eyebrow.  “Attractive?”

Kara was having no truck with Alex’s teasing.  “Just because I don’t date a lot doesn’t mean my lady parts are dead.”

Alex chuckled.  “Well, she’s a Major in the U.S. Army, high powered lawyer too.  Judge Advocate General’s office.  Her dad’s a famous general.  He was the one responsible for Astra’s torture.”

Kara’s face darkened.  “And they put her in charge?”

“She’s not like him,” Alex assured her.  “Actually, it’s because of her that Astra’s alive and that I got to leave with a decent ‘retirement’ package.  She lawyered the crap out of her army brass and negotiated clearing Astra’s record in exchange for neutralizing your uncle.  And she put me under a new NDA specific to the torture stuff, but she got me out of there with enough money to open this shop.”

Having the daughter of the man who had tortured one of her only living relatives --one of the only living members of her race, actually -- in charge of a well-outfitted paramilitary organization like the DEO made her uncomfortable.  But she had to admit that it seemed like Lucy was doing her best to do right in an unspeakably bad situation.  “So she’s not like her father, then?”

Alex shook her head.  “No, doesn’t seem that way.  Susan stuck around for a little while after I left, and I sort of got the vibe from her that it’s actually a sore point for Director Lane that she has to constantly prove that she’s not her dad.”

Kara nodded.  She could understand that.  Since moving to National City, she’d had a few run-ins with former Fort Rozz inmates who had been sent there by her mother.  After the first one, Alex and Astra had made it a priority to teach her how to fight properly.  The Earth’s sun gave Kara incredible strength and speed, but some of her attackers had powers too, so she had to do a bit better than punch and pray.  And it was all thanks to the fact that she was constantly being made to answer for her mother’s particularly judge-y years of judging.

“Anyway, it’s all academic, because I’m not going back.”  Alex tapped the end of the tattoo gun.  “Alright, sis, roll up that sleeve and let’s see if this works like I think it’s going to.”

 

*******************

 

They emerged onto the roof deck, with the sky becoming paler as they stepped out of the glass elevator of the penthouse.  She felt Lena and Lucy, each with a hand on one of her shoulders, nudge her forward. 

Lucy hadn’t been joking.  Kara glanced around and saw the wide-open seating area with a number of waterproof couches, and low glass tables, a fire pit for cooler weather, a gazebo at the far end with gauzy panels that enclosed whatever was inside, and a long row of wooden frames with a trellis featuring hanging gardens of lilacs, clematis, trumpet vines.  Their perfume struck Kara’s senses the moment they stepped out of the elevator.  

And at the end of the roof deck opposite where the gazebo sat, was an altar to Aten.  Clearly, it was not a store-bought affair.  Lena had to have paid someone handsomely to design and build  it, as it managed to retain notes of traditionalist Egyptian influence but was sculpted entirely out of colored glass and looked as though it was still liquid.  She was struck in particular by the sun at its peak, its rays extending downward, threaded with gold that would no doubt come to life when the sun rose in earnest.  It was no stretch to imagine that its appearance would be something close to divine.

“It’s a beautiful altar.”

Lena lifted her chin with pride.  “It’s a Dale Chihuly.”

Kara gave a low whistle.  “I didn’t know he did that sort of thing.”

“He doesn’t normally.  But he was a personal friend of my father’s.”  

Kara watched with reverence.  She glanced over her shoulder.  “What’s inside the little pavilion?”

Lucy smiled.  “When the weather is right, and the nights aren’t too cold, we like to sleep up here.  There’s a pretty comfortable bed in there.  The curtains are enough to offer privacy but very light, so the sun comes in.”

Kara was envious.  “Sleeping out in the fresh air,” she sighed, “getting those first rays of the morning sun on your skin?  Sounds heavenly.”

Lena nodded, and there was a little spark in her eye.

The air was perfect.  Kara decided she wanted to feel it on her bare arms.  She doffed her cardigan and tossed it over her shoulder, and beside her, she heard Lucy gasp.  

Kara reddened.  She’d almost forgotten about her tattoos.  “Oh, sorry.”  She grinned.  She wasn’t sure why she was apologizing.

Lucy’s hand rose to touch Kara’s bicep but then stopped.  She looked up at Kara.  “May I?”

“Uh, sure.”  She didn’t know why she felt shy, or why Lucy felt she needed permission, but she glanced over and saw that Lena was looking similarly awed.

Kara knew Alex’s work was beautiful, but she had sort of taken it for granted.  She didn’t really think about the fact that there would be anything unusual about someone’s skin being etched with shining golden star maps, non-euclidian geometry, Kryptonian poetry and advanced calculus.   But she supposed there was, given the responses from the two of them.

Lucy’s fingers traced over the round of Kara’s shoulder and fluttered over the solar system that lived there.  “This isn’t our solar system,” she observed, touching the raised lines between the stars and the concentric rings that mapped the planets’ orbits.

“It’s the star system where I was born.”

Lucy’s finger settled on the largest of the golden orbs in the center.  “That’s your sun?”

“Yeah, that’s Rao.”

“That’s your god’s name, isn’t it,” Lena was quick to remark.

Kara nodded, her eyes gleaming.  “Yep.  My god is a sun god too.”

Lena was intrigued.  “How did your sister manage to ink you?  I would think your healing powers would just spit the ink out of you after a bit.”

“She’s smart.  She treated it with some isotope to trick my cells into thinking it was a bio-implant, I think.”

Lena was tracing the lines of a complex equation for converting regular crystals into ones that broke symmetry through time rather than through space.  “I can’t read all these characters but this looks like some pretty advanced math.”

“Yeah.  It’s the equation that deduces the atomic formula for time crystals.”

Lena gasped.  “No.  Those are just theoretical!”

“They weren’t on Krypton.”

Lena bit her lip.  “You’ll have to tell me all about that.”

Kara pointed toward the horizon, where the first white-gold fingers of sun were creeping up over the horizon.  “Later, though, right?”

Lena chuckled softly.  “Yeah.  Later.”

 

*************************

 

Being Atenist in America was not unlike being Jewish, or Mormon; it came with a certain cachet, a collection of stereotypes, not all of them negative, and a painful history of Christian and sometimes secularist persecution that often got swept under the rug.  Kara was learning this in bits and pieces.

It wasn’t long after Lucy Lane’s visit to the tattoo shop that Kara met Cat Grant.  She had swooped in and grabbed her son Carter out of the path of an out-of-control taxicab.  Cat was beside herself with gratitude and said, “If there’s anything I can do to repay you…”

“Actually,” Kara said a little shyly, realizing that this just happened to be Cat Grant, Queen of All Media, “I _am_ looking for a job right now.”

Cat folded her arms and appraised her for a moment.  “Do you have any qualifications besides snatching children from the jaws of death?”

Kara shrugged.  “Double masters degrees in creative writing and quantum particle physics?”

And that was how Kara became a science columnist at the Tribune, and how she met Lena Luthor, an influential board member on the National City Science Council.

The Science Council was highly respected in the city, but everyone suspected that they were involved in a great deal more than simply promoting the virtues of a well-rounded education that relied upon scientific principles and doling out scholarships to deserving youth in the poorer quarters.  Everyone knew they had extensive research labs in the lower floors of their downtown high-rise and while a not-insignificant number of peer-reviewed studies came out of there each year on subjects like the effects of climate change on grape yields in the Napa Valley, and quantum chemistry studies on the structural and dynamic molecular properties of crystals, rumours always rumbled that something else was afoot, though nobody seemed to have any idea what.

Kara was meeting with her to talk about the Science Council’s current plan to introduce a theoretical chemistry module for bright school kids at the lower elementary level.  Kara liked the idea and was interested in talking with the architect of the plan, and that architect had been none other than Lena Luthor.

They’d met over a health food lunch in a glass-walled cafe on the plaza across from the Science Council’s building.  Kara had begun the interview asking about child psychology, what the module would be designed to teach, and whether it made sense to introduce theoretical chemistry to fourth graders who didn’t yet have grasp of calculus.  From there it pretty much wandered off the topic of the interview and they were discussing the flaws of string theory and having a good chuckle over whether the Large Hadron Collider had in fact ended the world and they were living in an alternate reality timeline and would never know it.

Kara had not enjoyed someone’s company so much outside of her own family in a long time.  She met a few smart people at Northwestern, but none like Lena.  And certainly, Lena was the prettiest girl who had been willing to give Kara the time of day in a long while.  She didn’t quite know how to ask her relationship status, but she hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, and she didn’t ever mention a spouse or a partner, and she seemed to always go out of her way to take and return Kara’s calls.  She tried not to get too excited when Lena invited her to her penthouse for dinner, and tried not to be too disappointed when she finally heard Lena utter the words, “We’d love to have you for cocktails up on the roof deck.”

 _We,_ she thought.   _Oh, well._

Still, Lena was a friend, and Kara didn’t have many of those in National City yet.  So she was still looking forward to it.

It took her about five minutes to get over the shock of Lucy Lane opening the door.

  


************************************

 

Kara was enjoying the rapt attention that Lena and Lucy were paying to the gold on her skin, conscious of how their fingers followed the lines up to where they disappeared beneath her shirt.  She turned her head to look at Lena, who was looking up at her in a way that Kara could only describe as thirsty.

“Do you want to wait on the couches, or would you like to come to the altar with us?” Lena asked.

“She should come,” Lucy said before Kara could answer.  “Look at her.  Look at all this.”  She was tracing her fingers down the swirling lines of Kryptonese that spilled down and around her bicep underneath the star map.  “This deserves a blessing from the Aten, don’t you think?”

The lightness of her touch was distracting.  It was also making it very difficult for Kara to say no.

“What are these words?”  Lucy asked.

“A few lines from a Raoite hymn that I like.”

“What do they say?” she pressed.

Kara cleared her throat, a little awkwardly:

“We have been given the world itself,  
And the sky, and your light,  
_And the genius to perfect ourselves  
_ Ever closer to your image.”

Lucy bit her lip.  “I love that.”

Kara flushed.  

“I think you should come to the altar.”  Lucy paused.  “I mean, if you want.”

Lena took her hand off of Kara’s arm and reached for Lucy’s.  “Honey,” she said softly, and gestured toward the horizon, where the sun continued its relentless ascent.

Lucy took Lena’s hand.  They both looked at Kara.  “You don’t have to participate,” Lena assured her, “but you’d be welcome.”

 

*****

 

That first dinner had started off awkward, because they weren’t quite sure how they ought to relate to one another given the other way in which they were connected, but by the end of it, Kara could see the way Lena and Lucy balanced each other’s energies.  She was still a little disappointed by the fact that Lena was not available, but she also found that she really liked Lucy and really didn’t want to get in the way of something that seemed, by and large, positive and healthy.  By the end of that evening, they were talking about NASA’s budgetary difficulties, discussing where to find the best Chinese restaurants in town, and sharing their favorite cuts out of their music selections.  Lucy approved of Kara’s gauzy little gem, Sharon Van Etten’s “Taking Chances”, and Kara was game enough about trying some of the lighter selections from Lucy’s surprisingly extensive hard rock and metal catalog.

Six dinners later, Lucy confessed that she and Lena, before having become friends with her, had seen her streaking across the sky downtown and whispered to each other that she must be an angel.

A dozen dinners later, Lucy had opened up to her a little.  She’d talked about some of what she had seen and done in Afghanistan.  Kara could feel that she was still holding back, because that was something she was used to doing, too, and knew what it felt like.  She took the little bits and pieces that were offered gratefully, because she knew that they were precious and valuable.

Lucy noticed the golden lines peeking out from under Kara’s shirt sleeve, the edges of what looked to her like a spiderweb pattern.  “What’s that?” She tugged at Kara’s cuff.

“Oh!”  Kara smiled, and tugged her sleeve up, revealing what looked like a narrow bracelet around her wrist.  “My tattoo.”

“That’s a tattoo?” Lucy was incredulous.  

“Yeah.  Alex does metallic inks.”

“What is it?”

Kara smiled.  “Well, the whole reason that she started trying to develop ways to work in gold was because of her interest in the Japanese art of kintsugi.”

Lucy tilted her head, curious.  “I thought that was Vasquez’s thing.”

“No, Susan’s thing is black ink.  Sumi-e.  Kintsugi is like when you have pottery that breaks, they have a special gold lacquer that they use to repair the pottery.  The theory is that the piece becomes more beautiful for having been broken.”

Lucy looked deeply moved by this.  “So this little cuff is meant to look like a piece of kintsugi?”

Kara nodded.

That was the night that Kara explained to them just how broken she was.  She told them about watching her world go up in flames.  They sat on either side of her and held her hands.

It was hard for her to leave that night, and harder for them to let her go.

  


***********

 

Lucy and Lena walked hand in hand toward the altar.  Kara hesitated behind them for a moment, uncertain of whether it was proper or not for her to participate in another faith’s rituals.  She’d been to a good many Christian church services of course, but there was something less personal about that because there were so many people.  And once, a Passover Seder where she didn’t understand the prayers and discovered that horseradish was really not her thing.  She had no frame of reference for a blessed meal.  Raoites didn’t do anything like that.  But she sure knew what an altar was, and somehow having an altar and going before it… seemed a bit more of an explicit act of faith and she couldn’t explain why, but she felt funny about it.  But then, she was not on Rao’s world now, she was on Aten’s, so perhaps?  When in Rome?  

While she was busy deliberating this with herself, Lucy and Lena came before the altar, and to Kara’s surprise, removed their clothing, and then knelt down before it in the cool morning air, facing one another, hands gripping each other’s shoulders.  She had heard that the Atenist practice of baring their shoulders the the sun during public prayer often extended to naked prayer at home, but she had still not been quite ready for it.

Kara felt suddenly as if her whole body was blushing.  “If I come up,” she called, laughing nervously, “do I have to get naked?”

Lena didn’t turn around, but Kara heard her chuckle.  “Only if you want to.  But I think it would be a shame to hide whatever else you’ve got under there from Aten’s light.”

Kara wavered half a moment more.  Then she muttered to herself, “Ah, screw it.”  

She scrambled out of her clothes, marched forward, and knelt behind them.

 

*********************

 

“Splendid You rise, O living Aten, Eternal God!  
_You are radiant, beauteous, mighty.  
_ Your love is Great, immense”

The words … they were so beautiful … they made sense….

 _“Your rays light up all faces,  
_ _Your bright hue gives life to hearts”_

The sunlight pooled within the great glass sun on top of the altar and shot down the threads of gold woven through it and Kara thought it was one of the most artistically well-considered things she had ever seen.

“When You fill the Two Lands with Your love  
_August God who fashioned itself,  
_ Who made every land, created what is in it”

Lucy and Lena’s voices flowed through the words easily, having sung them together so many times.  They released their hold upon one another and turned to Kara.  Their eyes sought permission, and Kara gave it, nodding her assent.  Lena and Lucy each placed a hand on one of her shoulders, drew her into their communion.

“All peoples, herds, and flocks  
All trees that grow from soil  
_They live when You dawn for them  
_ You are mother and father of all that You have made.”

And then quiet fell.  The sun continued its ascent.  The three were splashed in beads of light scattered like glowing pearls by the gleaming glass altar.  The markings across Kara’s skin shone mellow gold in the rising sun, and when Lucy and Lena opened their eyes, they took in their full magnificence, and were both awed into quiet for a few moments.

Because Kara’s body had become, since her move here, a canvas for all the beauty she could wring from her soul.  She had Rao’s star system on her shoulder, and this one wrapped around her leg, from knee to ankle, with a gleaming golden sun upon her knee.  She had poetry and equations on her arms, and one lone shakespeare quote on the inside of her wrist:  “Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear.”  It was at Alex’s insistence, a reminder, ever present, of her sister’s love and affection, as if the art covering her body were not enough.

“Aten bless us,” Lena whispered finally, and took Kara’s arm, and gently kissed the artwork of  Bohr’s model for a hydrogen atom that was marked on Kara’s wrist.  

She and Lucy exchanged a long, signficant look.

Lucy took Kara’s other arm, inspecting it, and mouthed silently to herself the Shakespeare quote.  “That’s you, isn’t it,” she said after a moment.

“Alex seems to think so,” Kara answered, humbled at the reverence of their attention.  They looked magical in the dappled, broken light of the yellow sun through the altar.  

“She’s right.”  Lena’s voice was soft as morning, soft as breezes.  

“You’ve been gifted,” Lucy whispered.

“Blessed,” Lena agreed.  “Aten has blessed you with powers, and has blessed us with you.”

Kara’s stomach dropped forty-seven stories as she watched them lean forward, and kiss one another, and then they both tilted their heads down and kissed her shoulders.  She shuddered involuntarily at the feeling of their warm mouths on her skin, and the contrast with the cool air.  She was briefly aware of what the cool air was doing to the rest of her body too, but decided it didn’t matter.

And the sun continued to rise, bathing the sky in gold.

“Can we have you?”  Lucy asked.

Kara’s hands shook.  She was pretty sure she knew what that meant.  “Yes, I … I think so.”

“Don’t feel pressured,” Lena whispered.  “You have to offer yourself freely.”

Lena’s eyes gazed at her, blue green and shiny, catching the light like the altar glass.  Her mouth looked so soft, Kara thought.  

Somehow, all that could come out of her mouth though, was, “I do!  But … here?  Isn’t that like, sacrilegious or something?”  She felt like an idiot, but she had to ask,

Lucy laughed softly beside her and it was a sound like cocoa powder and Kara loved it.  “No, the Aten blesses our lovemaking,” she chuckled, as though Kara had said something very silly.

And then she was embraced by them both, one on either side, and it was so much soft, warm skin baking in the rising sun.  And their fingers traveled relentlessly, exploring all of her gold-lined skin, and their soft mouths kissed hers, and tasted her chin, jaw, neck and shoulders, and they murmured things –soft things, things that sounded holy, things that sounded hot– and she thought, _Thank you, Rao.  Thank you, Aten.  By your golden light, refracted through the prism of this altar, thank you._

And the sun continued its ascent.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know in the comments if you would like to see this in a long form fic. I have a lot of ideas....


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